Your article did an excellent job of explaining the the importance of group economics in black communities. It was especially interesting that you mentioned that Black cooperatives were labeled communist and jailed in the McCarthy era.

Even after this, black people were labeled communists for wanting to participate in a different socioeconomic system.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after the, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand why I’m saying? . . . we knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war on black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and the criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt these communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did” (Vitale, 2018)

Black people have always been grouped with the “left,” suggesting that methods being used to fight systematic racism were not legitimate.

Vitale, A. S. (2018). The end of policing. London, UK: Verso.